


great red dragon

by liraels



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, angel au, blasphemy like as a genre, eve is a guardian angel, this is a bit stupid really but i am having fun which is the main thing, you will never guess who she is guarding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:48:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27344581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liraels/pseuds/liraels
Summary: Villanelle purses her mouth into a perfect O. “So, it’s true? Now you are here to…save my soul?” The O splits into a grin, sharp-edged, glinting in the sun. “Good luck with that.”-Eve falls from Heaven. Straight into Villanelle’s lap.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 92
Kudos: 261





	1. Romans 5:12

**Author's Note:**

> hey friends, this will be a mess. hope u enjoy regardless
> 
> that said i did reread parts of the Bible for this. but also being an ex-catholic is all the credentials I need methinks. the angel aspect is also inspired by: His Dark Materials, Paradise Lost, Skellig, Good Omens, though not really attributed to any of them because making shit up is fun.
> 
> this chapter will read a little strangely. you’ll see what I mean. it’s eve pov, to be clear. 
> 
> no posting schedule, sorry, bc this is a hobby and the world is a mess and we die like men :)
> 
> thanks very much to @ lightfighter for beta reading this chap <3

_Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned –_

She falls.

The fall is supposedly symbolic, but they do a good job of making it _feel_ real these days, don’t they? Gods and their dramatics.

 _God_ , she thinks hastily, _singular_. She’s committed enough heresies for one afternoon.

Yet still, she falls. The wind whips at her hair and her wings and it feels like her stomach is plunging far down below her in the blue-white sky. She doesn’t have a stomach, of course, angels don’t hunger, they don’t want, but it’s all part of the experience. Like 3-D. Or so she guesses.

She falls so fast that it cannot be real falling, anyway, no; this is propulsion. She is falling from Heaven, but to fall she first had to have been pushed.

The sky may be metaphorical, but is also… _greedy_. She falls past a wisp of cloud that looks vaguely like a face, twisted and snarling; it wants her. It wants her to fall and fall forever and perhaps she might, perhaps this is the true punishment. She knows little of Hell – taboo subject, you know – but this could be it. Then Heaven would be any solid ground.

Air snatches at her wings, but this does not slow her. Not even all six of them stretched to their full span can compete with the force of her falling, all they can do is turn the straight plummet into a spiral that is considerably more unpleasant, not to mention hard on her back.

So, she stops trying after half an hour or so. She stops trying and lets herself fall. Tries to enjoy it.

Fairly, she _should_ enjoy it. She asked for it, she practically jumped before she was pushed. But she had enjoyed Heaven, too. She enjoyed her job. Guardian angel, what a bore, they all said, don’t you wish you were a herald, a principality? Well, no, not her. She loved her job, and how many other people can say that? She dug herself into it like she’d find forgiveness at the bottom of the hole, like she needed forgiveness at all – and in the end, as irony often proves, it turned out that she did. Hence, the falling.

Really, though, the point still stands. All those hours clocked, lunch breaks skipped. She took extra shifts, guarded her charge with a care bordering on obsession. She was the best! And this is how they treat her?

The sky is getting boring. So much blue. So she curves her wings to flip over, now falling face first to the Earth below. She should have hit it long before now, by all rights, and yet there it is. There it _metaphorically_ is. All grey-brown-blue metaphor concealed beneath wispy metaphorical clouds, metaphor tugging at her hair and metaphor chilling her to the bone.

Where will she land? She hopes it isn’t America, or Antarctica or, for that matter, the middle of the ocean.

She hopes, in a small, tired way, that she might find herself in Europe. Anywhere in Europe would do, she could find her way, but what if – Paris? Imagine her luck.

Is it okay for her to hope that? Is that wish an extension of the sin that threw her down from Heaven? She can’t really tell. Angels aren’t supposed to have moral compasses – or if they did, they’d point only true north. Not like humans at all, no latitude there. Although _she_ is what you might call a special case, tilting East, tilting West.

Direction is something about which she knows very little. Perhaps it was her first life which caused that, so many millennia ago. Or perhaps it was this past year that did it – the corruption, the bedevilment.

And the corruptor – she smiles despite herself at the title, it’s very Book of Genesis – is the very thing she might find in Paris, and that very thing is also the very reason she is falling in the first place. It is not a good idea, she decides, closing her prickling eyes as they start to stream. She will not go to Paris. She will not go to Europe at all. She’ll go to America or Antarctica despite her better inclinations because to fall is to be punished and she deserves all the punishment the Earth can inflict, doesn’t she? She can find a job and live in a house and be human, be normal. She will forget.

And as her fall starts to marginally slow she allows her thoughts to stray where they will, to dwell for the very last time on...on her original sin, you might say, if you were being blasphemous. Which she is, currently, inclined to be.

Because the charge she watched over, the woman –

She hits the ground.

It is a Monday when she is first assigned to Villanelle, because even Monday mornings still happen in Heaven. God may be all-powerful but he cannot do everything. She curses him, quietly, in the shadows of her subconscious. She questions his willingness more than his capacities.

Her previous charge died on the Friday, as they all eventually do. She lost count centuries ago, but he was somewhere around her fortieth.

Monday mornings are one thing, but here is another problem they have in Heaven: your boss. Heaven is nothing if not hierarchy. Her own superior is no exception to the rule, and today her superior isn’t merely an annoyance but she is also _wrong_. This new assignment – it makes no sense, there must have been a mistake, and she says as much.

There is no mistake, comes the reply, cool and collected as ever. As if she could be cast out of Heaven for even daring to suggest it.

But she’s – She hesitates, but not for long. This whole thing reeks. She forges forward. This one’s an adult, she says, she’s twenty-five, what is this?

The response is slow, measured: Her age should make no difference. I know they say a lot about neuroplasticity, these days, moulding them while they’re young, but really. Man is man. She should be plenty manageable. You dealt with that serial killer rather well, didn’t you? Was that last century?

Eighteenth, she corrects.

Ah. Her superior pauses, seems to consider. Then: Well, regardless, your track record is solid, and you have a strong stomach. I am entrusting you with Villanelle henceforth.

Why is my stomach –

You’ll see.

She acquiesces demurely – she must do everything demurely, politely. Most angels wouldn’t notice. It’s just the natural way of their kind, it wouldn’t even warrant an adverb. But for _her_ it is conscious. She acts it out. Demure is a suit she irons out and slips on in the morning and never takes off at night because of course angels do not sleep.

She envies humans, sometimes. Don’t tell her boss that. And especially don’t tell her boss’ boss.

She makes to leave, to start her Monday reading up on this new charge. Background work is not a regular part of her job – you get them at birth, the most you might do is check their family history, familiarise yourself with the cultural context. But of course, she’ll have to catch up on _twenty-five years_ ’ worth of this woman’s life. And she somehow doubts Villanelle is much of a do-gooder.

It’s going to be a very long week.

What happened to her last one? she asks, before she can stop herself.

Her superior grumbles. He’s taken some time off. Stress, you know. Between you and me, I think he had it coming.

Stress caused by – by her? What’s _wrong_ with her?

Her question is met with a withering look, or the closest a mostly-symbolic divine being knit from terrible holy flesh can come to a withering look. That’s not the kind of thing anyone asks, here. Not _what’s wrong with them_ , but _how can they be improved_? Not looking for the sin but the paths out of it. Well, whatever. She has never been a whiz at the terminology.

Villanelle is a special case, her superior replies dismissively. Get to work, you will see. Good day.

Two months pass, barely a blink in the eye of eternity. Yet it feels like an eternity itself while she is living it: she gets to work, she reads the file, she watches Villanelle. Because Villanelle is not a do-gooder. Not in the slightest.

She is an _assassin_. And a good one, too, by the looks of things. The only measure she has is her eighteenth-century serial killer who poisoned hospital patients. It was exciting at the time, but that charge was not nearly as good at killing as Villanelle. Villanelle has the advantage of 21st century technology, and transport, and guns. But she uses knives sometimes, too, occasionally her hands, and all kinds of toxins. 

The real difference is, Villanelle has style. Panache. A twisted sense of artistry. A delicate hairpin through the eye is as precise and exquisite as a bullet to the head, at least when Villanelle holds the weapon.

It took her a good week to read the file, and she started her new role officially on the following Monday. Guarding is typically just a lot of watching, occasional nudging, prodding the pockets of good in a soul and encouraging them to bloom. Like gardening.

There are no pockets of good in Villanelle. Gardening, she thinks, is a lost cause. She’d have more luck with a slash and burn. But to do that, she’d need permission from on high, which involves a lot of qualifications and a _lot_ of paperwork. Not to mention the inclination, which she lacks.

And anyway, she is perfectly content to simply watch.

On that first Monday, Villanelle killed three people. They were gathered in the same conference room on the fifty-sixth floor of a commercial high-rise in Berlin. It was broad daylight. Villanelle entered, holding a tray of coffee cups. When the man stood to take his long black she dropped the coffee and performed the magic act of making the blade of a knife disappear into his throat. Sleight of hand, in the same moment she drew a silenced pistol from a holster on her back and shot the two women in the head. She has impeccable aim – each shot punctured an eye, pierced the brain, and lodged in the back of the victim’s skulls, so no bullets ricocheted and nobody outside the room noticed anything amiss. Villanelle left, then, complaining amiably to the intern in the elevator about the coffee spilled on her shoes.

Watching from on high, she saw then what her superior meant about needing a strong stomach.

And now, it's been weeks. And she is...well, she hasn't quit yet.

She’d think she was going insane, if that was something angels ever did. Maybe she just appreciates art? Art is godly. Hard work is godly. It takes grit and work ethic to kill people on the daily. It takes a healthy appreciation of beauty to do it so well.

Okay, she is making excuses, she is deluding herself. At least she is self-aware.

Sometimes she thinks she could watch Villanelle all day, all night, until Heaven falls or until Villanelle dies, whichever is sooner.

How are you going, her superior asks a few months in, with this Oksana Astankova? Have you made any progress?

Depends how progress is defined. Has Villanelle stopped killing people for a living? Has she started to care about the suffering of those lives she snuffs out? Has she lost that spark of delight she seems to feel when she sees the soul drain out of her helpless victims? Does she even know what morals are, does she care to know? No and no and no and no. These are easy answers. Villanelle has made no progress at all. Her guardian angel is a different story.

But she doesn’t say any of this. She says, This is a difficult case. It is taking time.

Good, comes the reply. Good. I expected as much. I would be more worried if she woke up tomorrow repenting her sins. You are right. These things take time. Keep it up.

So, she keeps it up.

Sometimes, she imagines meeting her. Meeting Villanelle.

Hello, she’d say. I’m –

Villanelle would tilt her head, then, raise her eyebrows, twist those full lips. She’d say something like, “You are?” or “Hello. Your name is…?”

And then she would fail to answer because angels have no names, and though she is an exception in many respects in this case she is only one that proves the rule. The imagined conversation always ends there, no matter how dearly she wishes for it to continue.

She wants to ask, Why do you do it? What does it feel like? because these are some of the only things she doesn’t know about Villanelle.

She knows she’s building Villanelle up inside her head. The monster under the bed, the ghost in the mirror, the devil in every detail. But the thing is, Villanelle lives up to every pedestal she imagines and more. Villanelle is tireless. Every day, she wakes, she lazes, she squanders. She steals and lies and she lusts and kills and she covets and she takes, manipulates, fornicates; she is each of the deadly sins and she might even invent the eighth, one day, and they would name it after her. Villanelle lives in vice, but she is also of it.

As her guardian angel, she should be trying, at least, to turn her charge. However obviously futile that task may be.

She doesn’t try. If Villanelle is of vice, this vicious spiral, this void, then she wants to know where it ends. Or if Villanelle is just sin and sin and sin all the way down, black to the heart and to the atom, she wants to know that, too.

She keeps watching. She wonders whether she’d prefer it, if there were some nugget of good at the centre. Something deep down and dirtied but salvageable, something for her to work with and tease out and show off to her superior and deposit on God’s welcome mat.

She thinks, oh, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t prefer that at all.

The subconscious can be more easily penetrated in a soporific state, her superior advises after a year of no progress. Try visiting her dreams.

She does. Gladly.

The first time is a nonsense dream, a nothing dream. She steps into warped Parisian streets; the cramped rooms of a Russian orphanage; First Class seats on an aeroplane; twisted, flowing images of faceless people and blank postcards and curly dark hair twisted around fingers so tight it stops the blood and the fingers turn blue and black and then fall off to stick in the mass of unbrushed hair like morbid hairclips.

It’s too busy, this dream, there’s nothing here for her to grasp. No stepping on point. She slips in and out of the thought-current leaving nary a ripple.

The second night has more potential. This time, the dream is a woman.

She is middle-aged, dark-haired. She sits at a kitchen table under a low light, working through a stack of papers – marking them, maybe, a teacher? There is an air of homeliness about her that makes the empty chair next to her look inviting. Like maybe she should sit there and rest her elbow on the table and her chin on her hand and stare at this woman for hours on end, hooking her ankles around the woman’s legs. And because this is a dream – because this is _Villanelle’s_ dream – that is exactly what happens.

There is something here, she thinks as she observes the dream-scene. There is something to tug on. She could pull that loose string now and see what unravels but – she doesn’t. She would rather watch, and wait, and see.

Villanelle watches the woman, her cheek nestled in her hand like a child, for a long time. There are gaps, blurry patches in the surroundings – the half of the room behind Villanelle’s back drops into nothing like a sheer cliff, there are picture frames on the shelves but they are blank. This is typical for dreams. But there are also details that stick out like thumbs, waiting to be hammered down: the spidery scratch of pen on paper, the wedding ring on the woman’s finger. The fall of her hair, thick and dark and curled like welcome, or like a trap.

She thinks maybe Villanelle might kiss the woman. Maybe take the pen from her and replace it with one of her hands, push her chair back from the table and sit on her lap. Villanelle certainly wants to do these things – it’s in the very fabric of the dream, that want – but she doesn’t. She sits, and she looks, much like her guardian angel who does the same at this same moment. They are each content with it.

Her superior had it correct: it is much easier to penetrate the subconscious in a dream state. It is the closest a guardian angel may get to their charge. It is the closest anyone may get inside anybody. It is easier to nudge, in dreams. It is easier to take and twist and not just thoughts, mind you, but the brain itself and the soul trapped inside it.

It is easy to kill here, too. Or so she hears.

She reaches out. Feels the pound, pound, pound of Villanelle’s heart in her own ears. The gentle ocean of thought, swaying, cradling. She could make that sea into a storm. She could drain it to a basin of a dust. She could destroy Villanelle, just like… _that_.

A simple tug and this untouchable, invulnerable woman could wake up dead in her bed, and none would be the wiser.

If she had a heart, it would be pounding just as hard, in time with Villanelle’s. She feels – exhilarated.

The dream fades out as Villanelle wakes. No progress made. She is content with this.

The day before she falls from Heaven, the ice cracks beneath her feet. She cannot pretend she had no warning.

It’s been over a year. Have you nudged her at all? her superior asks. 

_No_ , she thinks. She resents the tone of the question.

Yes, she says, I’ve nudged her. Do you think I started this job yesterday?

Careful, is the reply. Careful, now. They are watching you. He is watching you. Tread cautiously. Make some progress. Nudge.

He can get stuffed, again she thinks but does not say. She says nothing. She thinks, but does not say, _Who cares? Who cares about them, about him, when there is_ her _?_

She opens her eyes.

Everything aches, but not from the fall. More likely from the transmutation from divine to physical form that the fall entails.

She sees blue sky – above her, not around her. And it is no longer metaphorical.

At the risk of drastic understatement…it is weird, to be corporeal. Physical space, physical _being_ …Look, the ground, the cobblestone road – she is touching it! With her _hands_. Her knees, her feet. She has skin, limbs, bones. Hair – she had hair in her angelic form, too, but now it falls down her back and into her face instead of floating on an unseen wind. There is a methodical thudding inside her chest that grows louder and faster and she almost chokes on the feel of it until she realises, oh, that must be her heart.

So. This is what it is like.

She’s lived it once, sure, a very long time ago. And of course she’s seen it in the time since. She’s watched the lives that criss-cross landscapes and timelines and combined to shape the Earth into what it is today. It’s her day job, and she did it well up to a point. But the difference between seeing and being is vast, and now she feels herself falling, falling, still, down that cavernous gap.

They deposited her on a dirty city street, looks like. A deserted lane. There is an overflowing skip – the _smell_ , oh, she might chop her own nose off before she gets back into Heaven – and a pile of wet newspapers, some empty beer cans. The labels on the cans are all in English, and she can just make out that one of the sodden, ink-run papers is a copy of the _Daily Mail_. 

England, maybe London. Not Paris, she thinks, with some relief. _Thank God_ , she thinks on instinct. Immediately takes it back because she is thanking him for nothing at the minute. Though there’s a touch of disappointment, too. She refuses to feel guilty about the disappointment.

She sits there for a while against the side of the skip and tries to adjust to the unsettling feeling of interacting with physical space. The bin is hard and cold against her spine, the ground damp with recent rain. Goosebumps form on her arms and she rubs them, recalling temperature, recalling sensation.

The discomfort isn’t unwelcome, she finds. Because she’s thinking about what the discomfort implies – its opposites. Comfort, contentment, love and thrill. Contrasts.

But it _is_ cold, and she vaguely remembers something about hypothermia. So she grasps one of the least-soggy newspapers from the top of the pile and drapes its spread pages over her shoulders. A broadsheet would have been better – damn tabloids – but it does the job, she thinks. At least it blocks a bit of the wind.

And she is so busy arranging her makeshift cloak out of the half-sodden newsprint that it takes her a moment to notice that there is someone there, on the other side of the skip. In her _vision_. That someone is speaking to her. Through her _ears_. Oh, to have ears!

But, she realises with dawning comprehension, if she’s all kitted out with the human bits, then…

Her hands shake as she tries to crane them – straining, protesting in their newness – to grasp at her back. God. _God_ , she thinks again, with more vehemence, a right curse. _God_ , _damn you_ , because if he’s – if he’s…

Her insides turn liquid with terror, drip down to her toes, and she feels it. Or, she doesn’t feel it – she doesn’t feel _them_ , and their absence is a presence in the way it chills her, horrifies…she feels claustrophobic, suddenly, breath coming thick and fast in her mouth, sour at the back of her tongue, and she will never leave the ground again; she’s lost six limbs, she’s lost everything…

“Are you okay?”

She is _not_ okay, thank you, though she doesn’t voice the thought because she cares more about her _wings_ than finding out if she has a functioning voice box.

But even in her grief, the looming someone is persistent, and still _there_. They crouch a few metres down the lane – _go away_ , can they not see she is going through something here? Don’t humans know to leave a mostly-ex-angel alone? Somebody should tell them. A little sympathy for the unemployed. For the newly _wing-less_.

“Do you need help?” the someone asks.

“No, no, I’m fine, sorry, just – “

“You’re kneeling on the street. They are very dirty here in London, you have to be careful.”

Her head shoots up with a jolt – the voice is familiar, so familiar, the _most_ familiar. She squints, blinks, tries desperately to remember what it feels like to look at things and she must succeed because suddenly she is seeing _her_.

Before her on the street, dropped into a spring-tight crouch. Features pulled into a look of concern that she _knows_ is fake. One hand half-outstretched to – what? To touch her? Repulsion strikes through her at the thought, then _interest_ , and then repulsion again, in nauseating waves.

Feeling is awful, in this humanoid form, truly awful. She might be sick.

She remembers how joints work and her head lurches as she scrambles back, moving through space, actual space. The newspaper flutters to the ground as she falls onto her back– _pain_ , they don’t have that in Heaven. It’s almost as bad as feeling, how do they cope?

The woman before her tenses, eyes flashing. From concerned bystander to alert predator in less than a second, the transition as easy and natural as the flexing of a muscle. She’s seen this woman before. She’s seen everything of this woman before, each inch of steel, each point, each claw. But never like this. Never up close, never Daniel in the lion’s den.

Something fumbles in her chest, bubbles out of her throat. It must be a laugh. She is laughing, because this is hilarious, because she is not even in Paris but of all the places on Earth she could have landed, she is here. Before this woman.

Before Villanelle.

 _And behold_ , she thinks deliriously, in the fog of her new grey matter, _a great red dragon._


	2. Isaiah 64:6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fyi this is an alternate universe where the UK signed the Schengen agreement so there’s no passport checks on the Eurostar. yes this has wide-ranging implications for the UK’s relationship with Europe in general but look don’t worry, you don’t need to think about it. please do not think about it
> 
> and I would like to thank @lightfighter for beta reading half this chapter, bless her soul (and go read everything she has written because it is all top-tier amazing-ness)
> 
> the also very talented @ewige has translated the first chapter of this into Russian which I think is just, the coolest thing I have ever seen: https://ficbook.net/readfic/10049106 
> 
> also you can find me @ liraels on tumblr (occasionally) or @ lliraels on twitter (more frequently bc that’s where I think in lieu of doing it in my brain like a normal person)
> 
> ok, I think that’s it for today. stay aware, stay safe all

_  
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away._

She stares at Villanelle, and Villanelle her, for a few long, fraying seconds before she realises the stark difference between them both.

Villanelle is wearing clothes.

She is wearing –

Well, she _was_ wearing a newspaper, at some stage back there. Now the pages have flown away in her shock and the wind tosses them high in the air. She watches them flap and skim about for a frozen moment. Villanelle doesn’t.

Because…humans have this damned modesty thing. Original sin, so inconvenient! – and she _is_ human now, of course, she hasn’t even got the wings to show for it anymore. So she scrapes her hands and the heels of her feet crawling hastily backwards behind the cover of the skip, and this blessedly means that Villanelle can no longer see her, and neither can she see Villanelle. She is naked in a public lane after metaphorically falling from Heaven and everything is awful but at least the very catalyst for her fall is not witnessing any of it.

Except, Villanelle is _still_ on the other side of this glorified rubbish bin. And she realises that the time she spent falling was probably the longest she’s gone without watching Villanelle for months. Now Villanelle is here, for the taking, and she is – what? Hiding? Averting her eyes? It’s embarrassing. Is this what being human is like, just a never-ending series of mortifications?

There’s a pull in her gut, her neck twitches like it wants to turn, to meet Villanelle’s eyes again. It’s unnatural, to be with her and not to watch. It’s unnatural not to watch at all.

She squashes the urge; time for a reset. She leans back against the skip to take several deep breaths. And maybe she is doomed to be this forever, this half-human thing without wings or dignity, unsuccessfully concealing herself beneath the _Daily Mail_ , now that is a crafty punishment.

“Are you sure you are okay?” Footsteps stop just beside the skip, not close enough for Villanelle to see where she is curled in the gutter but close enough for boots to echo on stone. “You are…you are naked.”

She closes her eyes. Breathe in, out. It doesn’t help. She opens her eyes again and goes back to hyperventilating. “Yes,” she says, and it comes out both breathless and vague. Her mouth is still adjusting to syllables, her brain to human language. “I noticed.”

“Why are you naked?”

“Uh.” She looks down at herself – all goosebump-plucked skin. This is part of the punishment, probably. Though it’s not like they have clothes in Heaven to lend her, and they don’t keep the ones you came in with. It’s not at all like prison, except when it is. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t remember.”

“So. You are a mystery?”

“I suppose.”

She has seen that smile spread across Villanelle’s face so many times that now she can almost _hear_ it.

“I like mysteries,” Villanelle says. “They’re like games. I will get you some clothes. Don’t worry. We’re just off Bond Street, I will be five minutes.”

“Oh. Okay. Uh, thank you.”

Footsteps. Wait, she thinks, before remembering that speech is an action, now, and not a thought.

“Wait,” she says, standing up on unsteady legs to clutch at the lip of the skip. She automatically goes to buffet her wings to steady herself; fails, of course, because she doesn’t have any. She’ll have a breakdown about that later. Now, the important thing is that she can see Villanelle properly, see her eyes, the shape of her jaw, her mouth slipping into a smirk. All the things she’d only seen omnisciently. Now – physical, made flesh, made real.

Her newfound knees give way again.

“Why are you helping me?” she asks, picking herself gingerly up from the ground. The pieces don’t quite fit together, she is wracking her brain for that missing clue that would explain why Villanelle would do a kind act for a stranger in a London street and she is coming up empty. She _knows_ Villanelle.

But maybe not completely.

Villanelle’s eyes rake down her face, through her hair. Lingering on her hair. “Because that’s what people do. Because I am very nice.”

The two statements are somewhat incompatible – kindness can’t be very widely generalised when it comes to humans, and she should know – but she doesn’t have time to point this out because Villanelle nods, once, and then is gone.

She is shivering out of her new skin by the time Villanelle returns, and has just started to realise that if someone else comes down this lane she will probably be arrested. The problem being: God doesn’t pay bail.

“I have clothes for you, strange woman,” Villanelle calls from the other side of the skip. “I am putting them here. I won’t look.”

The clothes piled atop the skip are warm, soft and perfectly sized, right down to the bra, which takes all the apparent courtesy out of _I won’t look_. The tags are still on – they are expensive, the pleated trousers alone in the hundreds of pounds. She chooses not to comment. Gift horse.

She ducks back behind the skip to dress herself. The shirt and jacket are sleek and cozy, fitting snugly against her torso. As if she needed another reminded of what she is lacking.

“Do you have a name?” asks Villanelle slyly.

A name? Oh. This is the stumbling block she’d never got over in her imaginings. Of course, humans have names, and they call each other by those names, and she is _human_ , now, for the most part. Names, names…This is _Villanelle_. And she is…she is…

“Eve,” she says, deciding. What better way to name oneself than out of resentment, and irony.

“Eve? How biblical.”

“Yes,” she – Eve – bites out, yanking on the trousers. Clothes are so odd, unnatural. _Who told thee that thou wast naked?_ – But she can’t very well swan around in the nude. “My father is pretty into religion.”

“It is a good name,” comes Villanelle’s drawl. Eve wonders why she’s let her natural Russian timbre show through. Usually she adopts the accent of whoever she is speaking to. And Eve herself is, she notices, speaking English in some kind of featureless American, maybe that’s part of the punishment too.

“So, Eve,” Villanelle continues, “you don’t remember how you came to be here. Where are you from? You are on holiday?”

Eve stands and stretches, trying not to wobble under the unfamiliar gravity, shakes out her hair and steps out from behind the skip. Saint George faced the dragon, and, like, he was an idiot. She can surely do the same. “Why are _you_ here?” she asks.

Villanelle shrugs, casual, hands in her pockets. “I am not the strange naked one.”

Eve stares at her – she likes being Eve, she realises, it fits her immediately – and refuses to explain herself. She is not the assassin here, she is not the one in sin.

…Alright, whatever. But it was just that one time.

“I was disposing of something, if you must know,” Villanelle says, finally, her gaze flicking over to the skip. Eve suspects she knows the kind of thing she was disposing of, if her assumption is right and Villanelle is in London for a job. “So, no, I don’t just lurk about in alleys looking for beautiful women with no clothes on. That is only ever a bonus.”

“Right. Well, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Do you have somewhere to stay?”

“I – “ Obviously not. She has no money, no identification. She doesn’t _exist_. The best she can do is maybe beg to be put up in a convent, pray and grovel and wait until someone up above decides to forgive her.

“No? In that case, you are welcome with me. You would like a drink?”

It’s then that Eve realises that Villanelle – her _charge_ , the _assassin_ – is hitting on her. God forbid. She can’t help but gape. “What?”

“I am asking,” Villanelle says, taking a couple of steps forward, “if you would like to go have drinks. Maybe you can tell me how you came to be naked in a lane way, if you remember? Or not. I don’t mind so much either way.”

God, it’s the same act she’s watched Villanelle put on so many times. Eve absolutely refuses to take part in it.

“No,” she replies. And because that feels too blunt – “Sorry.”

Villanelle shrugs. “Okay. I will not see you around, then. Goodbye, Eve, strange woman.”

She turns to go and Eve feels a sudden stab of – something. It stabs like pain but gapes like something else, like something much more sinister. She swallows it, feels it stick and undulate in her throat, her brand-shining-new insides. She can’t get over that – everything she is is _new_.

Villanelle stops before turning the corner, squints back at her. “Why can’t I look at you properly?”

“What?” Eve says dumbly, clenching her fists because she’s not otherwise sure what to do with them. Her voice betrays her, wavering nervously. “What do you mean?”

Villanelle crosses the distance between them in a few purposeful strides – and Eve has seen enough of Villanelle to know that being the object of one of Villanelle’s purposes is not a good thing to be. She flinches, stumbles back and almost falls without her wings to balance her. The urge to turn and run is so strong that she ignores it out of spite.

Villanelle stops, barely two feet away. “It kind of hurts,” she muses, sticking out her chin, “to look directly at you. It’s right – “ Eve blinks as Villanelle reaches out with a light fingertip, almost touches Eve’s brow – “here.”

It’s a hanging moment – who it hangs, is the question. Who breaks their neck on this?

 _Oh my God_ , Eve allows herself. _Oh, my God, why do you hate me, why must I suffer._

God doesn’t answer.

The notion of Villanelle touching her – of being _touched_ by _Villanelle_ , just one step from being _seen_ – finally spurs her into action. She blurts out a goodbye, or a thank you, or an okay, or maybe all of them at once (human language, it’s still setting in her brain), and then she slips past Villanelle and runs, runs for her life, runs for her sanity.

She gets a full dozen blocks away before she dares to slow down and discover that no one is chasing her, her feet are red and stinging, and she forgot to put on Villanelle’s expensive shoes.

She considers stealing some footwear, for a few damning, shameful moments. I mean, she’s already fallen, and what good has the seventh commandment ever done her?

All her problems would be solved if she just had her wings, which, Eve supposes, is precisely the point. She is itching to fly – her shoulder-blades still ache from the fall, she longs to grant them a much-needed stretch.

Of course, she never had wings, not really. Not in a strict, corporeal sense. She had the ghost of them, and that was all that mattered when you were little more than ghost yourself – as an angel, a sigh of wind could propel you, as could a shiver of static or a particularly determined thought.

The idea of wings was enough, then, and now – well, now, she has not even that. Nor the hope of regaining it. Humans aren’t moved by such weak, pithy things as as ideas, of course not! If it were so, Eve would have been out of a job long ago.

So, she comes to terms: she will never fly again.

It hurts more than she thought it would, this acceptance. And she starts to wonder – well, angels are creatures of thought, anybody knows that. Fire fights fire and thought, thought; that’s the whole deal, that’s the job.

All this to say, there is something she can do for herself. Digging around in her own brain is not nearly as pleasant as – look, it’s not pleasant. There’s too much lurking there she would rather not see, but she reassures herself with the knowledge that even those shadowy corners will soon enough be bleach-clean, spick-and-span.

In the meantime, she’s getting the hell out of London.

She sells Villanelle’s jacket at a pawn shop for the low, low price of 200 pounds. She feels zero remorse, though at least of the value is lost in the deal. This buys her some cheap sandals, a bus ticket to the station, and a meal purchased from a corner shop when she realises what her stomach rumbles are signalling.

The transactions are endeavours in themselves – _watching_ humans do their human things is vastly different to doing it yourself, but she manages. And she finds herself, stripped of heavenly gifts, staring at the list of outgoing cross-border trains and thinking _anywhere_.

Anywhere at all.

 _Not Paris_ , she thinks, dully.

Everything about Earth essentially sucks.

This is what Eve concludes – perhaps her first solid observation of the day – after a train and two buses have propelled her as far away from London, and Paris, as she can get before night falls.

She hates public transport, she has decided. Relying on some hunk of a machine instead of her own six wings. But she spent the trip pressing her head against the window and trying desperately not to think about it, it’s so very easy to feel sorry for herself.

Now, Eve’s exhausted even those hulking machines and, so, she walks, and walking beats trains. At least she’s on her own two legs, even if she so itches to fly instead.

And it is quiet in the evenings. It is not so _human_ , so _many_ , so _all the time_. It reminds her of Heaven, just a little bit. Something about the silence as the trees breathe in the wind, something about the crunching of her own feet on gravel, like footsteps in sand. A car shoots by every so often, just to crack the illusion.

She’s not sure where she’s going. Away. Away from Villanelle, far enough that she’ll hopefully never see her again. Villanelle ruined her life – why would she want to? She _doesn’t_ want to, that’s the point. Eve will never see her again and she doesn’t regret that in the slightest.

Eve passes a couple of pigeons, fighting over the crumbs from a fast food bag somebody might have tossed out the car window. She thinks hopefully that she is no longer a pigeon. Maybe she is a crow, they’re kind of cool. Or a dove.

It is now when she realises…there is something she is forgetting. Several somethings. But that is her decision, and so she must live with it – human memory is very easy to manipulate, she remembers _this_ , if little else. She recalls a workplace briefing, something about neurons and short- and long-term and a lot of things she tuned out but the main point was about humans retrieving not the event itself but the last time it was remembered. Whittling down the most treasured memories, blunting their corners – but preserving the heart of them, at the least. 

And Eve? She is running away. She is _choosing_ , and she’d rather not wait for slow erosion by brainwaves. So, forgetting it is. A small mercy, but perhaps the one thing she can control.

It is growing cold. What she would give to be able to wrap her wings around herself. And then, maybe, to spread them to their full span, to leap into the air, to fly…

She just wants to _see them_ , really, but maybe that’s being ungrateful – maybe she wishes other people could see them, too. Then she’d get some respect. She could simply spread them wide and would need only ask for some food, some money, whatever she wanted.

Maybe she just wants one particular person to see them. For kicks, you know.

All said, they were nothing special. Just the idea, the breath of wings – it’s not what they are in the stories, in all the paintings and on the stained-glass windows. Metaphor is not very dramatic, not very fear-of-God. She’ll be glad to have forgotten them and thus, their absence. Patience, Eve.

And anyway, maybe Eve is still a pigeon. Fighting over metaphorical crumbs tossed down by whoever the pigeon-god is. But pigeons, at least, can fly.

She’s awoken in the daylight before she clocks that it’s the first time, ever, that she has slept. How very human of her.

Eve’s stomach rumbles, and her throat is parched, and these things are also new. She will continue her flight, look for a somewhere to satiate these immediate needs. A convent, maybe.

She is determined not to read into the fog starting to populate behind her eyes, not to worry about it. She’s just tired. She’s still adjusting to gravity and these pesky human needs. Doubt creeps in as a tickle on the back of her neck, but she shakes it off and begins to walk.

It is a nice spot, really, the place she chooses to rest after her legs can no longer carry her. It’s not Heaven but it isn’t too bad for Earth – dawn light sprinkles through the canopy, a soft blanket of rotting leaves cushions her feet. Every so often she enters a clearing of tall grass or a copse of trees glowing gold amidst the evergreen.

The sun is high in the sky and her thighs are burning from climbing slope after slope when she forgets where she came from.

She knows, physically, where she started. In the east, and now she’s tracking west to follow the light. But before that – something about flying, something about aching shoulder blades and a very cold nose. London, she remembers London, London and a woman, but before that…her stomach lurches, she’s lost something, she needs it back! She grasps desperately but it slips through her mind like trickling water.

She leans against a tree to catch her breath and order her unravelling thoughts. A bird flits by her feet, pecking at the leaf litter, then dances up into the air, into the sky. Eve watches it go, admiring the spread of its wings, the fast hum-beats. She misses it. She’s missing _something_ , but _what_? and by the time she’s set on her way again she’s wondering why it is that her back aches so much, what on earth she could have been using her shoulder blades for that they’d be swelling up, as if sprained. Where she could have walked from that she would have worn through the soles of these cheap shoes.

They start to chafe as they disintegrate, so she kicks them off and proceeds barefoot.

She watches for more birds as she walks but sees none.

The sun is low and she’s left the woodland far behind for the grassy path beside a country road – her feet truly burning, now, and her stomach gaping – when she stumbles across people. Buildings. Civilisation. She trips her toes on pavement but keeps going, driven by…what? Some need to go, to find, to capture. It’s all she has, though the object of the urge is long lost, if ever one existed at all.

Eve stops before a café and stares at the menu plastered in the window. Salads, sandwiches, breakfasts and drinks. Maybe she could steal a muffin off that tray at the counter. Something in her balks at the notion, some branded instinct – but, seriously. She might _die_ – isn’t that something she has to worry about now?

She doesn’t want to die. She’s lived a long life – hasn’t she? She’s not at all sure what she’s done with that life but she’s sure it was long. And isn’t there something to live for?

Paris. There is something about Paris. Is that home?

The blip of a car horn makes her jolt and turn. A car slows and the burly man in the driver’s seat calls through the open window, “Where are your shoes, lady?”

Eve steps towards the stopped car, then back awkwardly, then shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Ha ha,” the man says, like it’s supposed to be a laugh but it’s not, it’s _ha ha_. Like he’s faking it. “You need help?”

“Where am I?” Eve asks in reply. Her Dutch isn’t bad, maybe she’s from around here?

“Opglabbeek.”

“Um, what country?”

“Ha ha,” he says again. “Belgium!”

“Oh.”

“You in some kind of trouble? You want a lift?”

“Why would you help me?”

He smiles, but doesn’t laugh this time. “Because it is a good thing to do. ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’”

The line niggles at something in Eve’s brain – what is it, poetry? Whatever it is, it flips some kind of switch. Either she dies of hunger in the gutter in a small Belgian town or she gets to Paris, somehow. Paris, her only touchstone.

“Where do you want to go?” the man asks as she slides in the passenger seat. The car is a little cramped – the burly man takes up more than his fair share – but it’s comfortable. A quartz rosary hangs from the rear-view mirror.

Eve says, “Paris.”

The man blinks at her. “You don’t want to go to Paris.”

“Why not?” She frowns, feeling spiteful now.

“Ha ha,” he says again, and Eve is starting to suspect that this man isn’t faking it. This is his sick-crow version of a genuine laugh, somehow, what he has for a personality besides picking up random women on the street. “Because it is the worst.”

He laughs again. Eve doesn’t. She wouldn’t know, is not in a position to judge. She’s never been to Paris. Never even seen it, that she can remember. She has no idea why she thinks she might go there, just that she should, and must.

Eve’s good Samaritan cannot drive her to Paris because he hates it and, besides, he is only going as far as Brussels.

The drive is silent but for the hum of the car and the crunch when the man dives into a mammoth bag of pretzels tucked against the handbrake. When Eve gives into her growling stomach and grabs herself a handful, he says nothing of it.

Except, ten minutes in, when they’ve swung onto the winding highway and the radio stops spitting out news headlines and starts to warble some awful song. Eve’s driver turns the volume down and announces, “My name is Bert.”

It takes a few seconds for her to realise that Bert is looking at her because he wants to know her name. A fair exchange. “Eve.”

“What are you doing with no shoes on, Eve? And these ripped-up clothes. You look like you have been walking a long way.”

“I don’t know.”

He hums, taps an out-of-time rhythm on the steering wheel. “My mother, she forgets, too. Wanders places. Sometimes with no clothes on at all. Ha ha.”

“Oh. No, I’m not like that. This isn’t something I do.” She frowns at herself. “I don’t think.”

“No? Then you are in trouble. Running from someone. It’s okay, no need to tell me. I like to help, but I’m also very nosy, you can just ignore that part, okay?”

Eve is trying to zone out looking at the moors rushing past, but her eyes keep snagging on the rosary beads, the little cross dancing every time they turn a corner. “Are you religious?” she blurts.

“Ha ha,” he says, and this time Eve is looking at his smile which does actually seem genuine. “I am a priest. So, I would say yes.”

“Oh.” Something stirs – some urge to get as far away as she can from this man. Even his friendly demeanour and generosity with his car and his pretzels don’t do much to settle the unease in her gut. She feels like that little cross, bouncing helplessly on string. She’s not at all sure why.

They don’t talk much after that. Eve rules out diving out the passenger side door because the highway stretches far and long and she’d risk death at these speeds, and then when they finally slow for busier roads and traffic they are so close to Brussels that she honestly cannot be bothered. Whatever her instincts dislike about this man and his religion can be discarded in the face of her blistered, aching feet.

Eve trains her gaze out the window, but a few times she notices Bert glancing over at her. He scrunches his eyes up, like he’s looking at the sun. Always a bad idea, really. But he doesn’t comment.

When Bert finally pulls up outside a central train station, Eve doesn’t hesitate in her scramble to get out – to stop staring at that little dancing cross. Until a light hand on her shoulder paralyses her in irrational terror.

“Hey,” Bert says, “take this.” He shakes a fifty euro note.

“Oh.” And she doesn’t refuse because this is a good Samaritan, a neighbour’s hospitality, it would be rude, otherwise. Against God – there’s something about God, she remembers, forgets. And besides, she really needs the money. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

And if she wonders briefly how much else he has in his wallet, whether she could snatch it from him and run before he can react…well, she doesn’t act on it, that’s the important thing. She takes the offered note.

“Maybe you go take yourself to a hospital, okay? Get that head checked.”

“Yes. Sure, thank you.”

“Come to think of it, maybe I need my head checked, too. Or my eyes checked,” Bert says, still squinting at her. “I could have sworn I saw…”

Eve slips out of the car and slams the door before he can finish. Before he can look again.

The money is just enough to buy another pair of cheap sandals and a train ticket to Charles de Gaulle, leaving 80 cents to spend on a chocolate bar that disappears without leaving a dent in her growing hunger. These bodily needs, not to mention the exhaustion, appear as unfamiliar beasts. She falls asleep before the train has even left the station.

She dreams about flying.

Paris is…vaguely familiar.

It ticks at her brain, niggles and burrows. She can almost feel it, this city, it almost _hurts_.

She meanders, stopping and starting. She pauses once at a newspaper stand to check the date, any headlines that might jog her memory of…anything, literally anything.

The woman at the stand doesn’t look her in the eyes when she asks if Eve would like anything. Eve replies no, thank you, and it’s only then that she realises that she’s speaking French. And, earlier, Bert spoke to her in Dutch and she responded in kind. She thinks she may have slipped into some German in Brussels. None of them feel at home between her teeth but they are automatic and fluent.

Curious. Everything is _curious_ and that’s fun, just a little bit, the mystery. But at the end of the night it is her own head she’s piecing together.

Somewhere in the sixth arrondisement (she finds herself a map so that she looks a confused tourist, instead of a wandering creep) a particular street corner picks up a thread of memory. She follows it through to a courtyard, bounded by apartments, and the thread knots in her stomach. _This_ place.

She doesn’t remember it, though…maybe she does. She’s never been here before, not physically. But it eats at something. She settles on the steps up to one of the apartment buildings, stretching her legs to ease her feet.

She sits. She waits.


	3. Psalm 139:7-9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please note there is a CONTENT WARNING in this chapter for mention of animal death/animal cruelty. it's a one-liner and not particularly vivid. this matter will also be brought up at a later date bc there are layers to these things but i will of course give another warning when the time comes.

_Where can I flee from your presence?_ _  
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;  
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.  
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,  
if I settle on the far side of the sea – _

Eve blinks and in the black of that blink, two things happen instantaneously. The first is she _remembers_. She remembers flying. She remembers falling. She remembers days, years...and the promise of centuries, millennia in Heaven, and the washed-out shades of a short life before that on Earth. The memory is a trickle, but she can sense the dam behind. Wonders what will happen when it breaks. Most importantly, she remembers watching, she remembers Villanelle. And that will do, for now.

The second thing is the knife at her throat.

Her initial, inexplicable reaction is to think, oh. Yes, she has well and truly fucked herself.

That’s the thing, she is practiced with thought, memory, all that mess – that was her profession, that was her flesh and her skin and she can control it. She can banish it, if she wants, and it wasn’t so hard at all. It wasn’t so hard to reign it back in, either, when she wanted to (she wants to). Thought is the stuff of angels.

But _instinct_. That’s a human thing.

Turns out Eve has a lot of it.

And she itches to lay it all out before her – from Heaven to here. To piece it together, to find the _reason_.

But these questions stir and drown themselves in less than a moment. She _is_ in mortal danger, so what she does is clench all her muscles still, gripping the lip of the stair beneath her thighs. Her attacker leans in, pressing tight to her back. Strong knees bracket Eve’s hips, and an arm hooks around her neck to steady it against the tip of the knife.

Eve is skewered, royally, and ready to roast. It isn’t hard to guess who holds the knife.

“Who are you?” Villanelle’s voice above her ear, humming with urgency. “Why are you following me?”

Eve swallows but it is arrested, sticks in her throat when Villanelle hoists her arm up higher and starts to strangle. Panic wells up, the sudden realisation that humans hurt, that humans die, and she is something of human now – she sputters, “I’m…not.”

The chokehold loosens only slightly, and in place of it Villanelle grips Eve’s sides tighter with her thighs. Eve tries to force herself to remember the pain. She knows pain, now, and there is clear danger in forgetting it around Villanelle. Villanelle who causes pain by nature, more than a gun does, more than a knife.

Eve’s cruddy new sandals smack against rough-cut stone as she struggles. The courtyard is empty, the two of them shielded entirely from the street outside. Someone might come out of one of these buildings, or look out a window, but she has no doubt that Villanelle would slip out of the resultant trouble with no skin off her back.

“You were in London,” Villanelle says bluntly. “Now you are here. This is not a coincidence.”

Eve swallows, tries to breathe out, in. It is hard to get over the fact that she is being touched, Villanelle’s bare elbow crooked beneath her chin, the curl of fingers against her throat as they hold the knife. It is hard to get over the fact that she has skin, that she feels, that she feels Villanelle.

“Okay,” she gasps. “Okay, I was following you.”

“How did you know where I am? Are you spying? Who do you work for?”

Hasn’t she been spying on Villanelle her whole life? “I’m your – “ She falters, she wants to say it. She wants to tell, she wants Villanelle to know that it’s _her_. _It’s me, I know you_.

It’s stupid, probably, and definitely selfish. But she stopped bowing to should and gave into want when she fell out of Heaven.

She thinks, _just spit it out_ , and then she does: “I’m your guardian angel.”

Villanelle’s grip doesn’t falter, neither does the knife waver. God, she’s good. “You’re what?”

“I’m an angel.” She cringes at it, she might be embarrassed. Which is ludicrous, she could _die_ right now, but she is embarrassed. “A guardian angel. _Yours_.”

Villanelle laughs throatily above Eve’s ear. “Okay, this is funny. This is the best one I’ve heard yet. Thank you for the entertainment but now I think I will take you behind that wall over there and I will kill you.”

Eve is yanked to her feet and then she’s stumbling, dragged along by the hook around her neck and propelled forward by the knife against the base of her spine. Again, she feels it – fear, remembrance of pain. She doesn’t want to die. And as thrilling as it would be for Villanelle to kill her in that artful, decadent way of hers – no, no, she refuses to follow that thought where it leads, she will leave that door locked, she wants to _live_.

So she grinds out everything that comes into her mind. “No,” she says frantically, “no, I’m serious, I’m – I know you! Your birth name is Oksana Astankova! You were born in Grizmet, Russia, you spent half your childhood in an orphanage. You were arrested for murder just out of school. You’re an assassin, you speak six languages. I know you!“

“So you have a file on me. Big deal.”

Villanelle is using the hand that fists the knife to fumble at the lock in a wall of wooden slats, promising somewhere dark and out of the way where no one will stumble over Eve’s corpse.

Then – it comes to her, and she almost shrieks, “ _No_! Wait, no – I know you – you dream about a woman! I know you, I can tell you. She’s a teacher –“

A choke eats her words again as Villanelle shoves her against the hard slats. They are so close she feels – _insane_ – closer than the alley yesterday, so close she can smell mossy perfume and feel hot breath.

 _Villanelle_ , Eve’s brain says, stuck record. Yeah, no shit.

“She’s…” Eve starts but chokes again, not because of Villanelle’s hand against her throat – her grip is relatively loose, just a warning – but because of sudden dryness in her mouth, her sandy tongue. Villanelle looks blank. Eve hoped she might see _something_ in those eyes up close, but they are just eyes. Normal eyes, or maybe even a little less. They reflect and they stare and Eve is doubly pinned.

“You want to…” She works her jaw, trying to unclench it. “She has dark hair, curly. You like watching her. You want to kiss her. Um. In your dreams.”

Villanelle doesn’t blink but she swallows visibly and Eve know she’s got to her, she’s plucked the right string – or the wrong one, depending on what happens next and how far Villanelle is willing to dig that knife into Eve’s thigh.

“You’ve seen my dreams?” Villanelle asks, low and measured.

“Yes. _Yes_. I’m an angel, a guardian angel, it’s something we do. I swear it – “

“Prove this thing.”

“Can we – “ Eve shifts under the twin prongs of Villanelle’s hand at her throat and the knife against her leg. “Can we take this somewhere else…you know, someone might walk by…”

Villanelle nods, releasing her only to grip her tightly around the waist. “That’s fair. It will be much less mess to kill you in my apartment. I can use the bathtub.”

Not quite what Eve had in mind. But at least she is getting somewhere.

Villanelle hauls them into one of the buildings and up some winding stairs. Eve recognises all of it, now. Something in her says _home_ , even though it isn’t, even though her real home is far away, up above, on an entirely different plane and more likely than not she’ll never get back to it.

They pass no one, but to onlookers they might seem close friends, or lovers, even, unable to separate just to walk a few steps. Though there is the blade pressed against Eve’s side, concealed between their bodies. What Villanelle could do with that blade, could do to her – Eve knows better than anyone.

They’re barely through the door when Villanelle uses her grip to spin Eve around and shove her face first against the wall. There is an urge to close her eyes as Villanelle pats her down, probing her sides and down her legs and even beneath her hair. She forces herself instead to study the aged, flaking paint she knows so well – that she momentarily forgot, along with everything. As precarious as this is, laying herself out beneath Villanelle’s knife, it’s better than being nothing at all.

And of course Villanelle’s hands smooth down Eve’s back with no resistance, and it only sort of aches a bit, though Villanelle is not rough about it.

Satisfied, Villanelle steps back and then she’s gone, trotting down the hall. Eve smooths her cheek, her palms against the wall for another moment. Still trying to adjust to the way her lungs constrict and collapse, the way her heart beats and then beats faster. She had all of this once, millennia ago, but now it’s as if she’s a newborn.

The apartment is familiar. Eve knows it, _remembers_ it with a wave of nausea. She remembers other things, too, but not quite everything. She remembers enough to notice all the holes. It’s like there’s a dam above her head and she’s holding it up, fingers wedged into the cracks.

Eve slips tentatively into the living room, where Villanelle has switched out the knife for a gun which hangs by her side. She chews noisily on a pear. It’s an act, the casualness of it all. She could still shoot Eve through the heart and all it would take is a millisecond of doubt.

“Sit,” Villanelle says through a crunch, juice running down her chin. No concept of shame – Eve ticks this observation off in her head. Just another item on the running list that confirms that this woman truly is the one she’s been watching for months, that this woman is real and here, that Eve had to fall from Heaven to see it.

It wouldn’t do to dwell on that, on prices, and worthiness, and weighs and balances; these things are all just rationalisations. Eve has seen that kind of thing enough from the outside, eating people's minds away, and who is she – angel or no – to refuse to fall into that same slow trap? She determines not to think about it.

Eve takes a seat on the couch. Her feet are still killing her. Villanelle sits on the coffee table opposite, leg curled beneath her, still clutching the gun and the pear like she’s weighing them. Though what she’s really weighing is Eve – Eve’s life. They both know this acutely.

The weighting, again, it’s the theme of the hour. Eve’s scales tip in obvious ways, but not so obvious as Villanelle is making it – she won’t settle for metaphor. For Villanelle it’s the gun versus the pear and the flavour of the next drop of juice that hits the floor. Clear, sweet and foamy, or something sharper and thicker and decidedly more red – if Eve bleeds at all.

In this more diminished moment, Eve realises she doesn’t know if she can die.

She has the vague – but threatening – memory of her time as an angel, of Heaven. But aside from that she is entirely human, as far as she can tell. Perhaps she was right to be so terrified.

“If you’re an angel,” Villanelle says bluntly, “then where are your wings?”

“Yes,” says Eve, in something of a trance. “Um. Good question.”

She’s schooling her expressions, Villanelle is – this is where she would be raising her eyebrows, tilting her head a bit to tease a smile. But her face is unnaturally blank. Eve wishes she didn’t know these things.

Villanelle waves the gun impatiently. “The answer?”

“It’s…complicated? I never really _had_ wings, not how you would think of them. Though, I _did_. I mean, we’re not even corporeal – so this is all new to me. I pinched myself earlier and it hurt.” Eve laughs, then, weakly. Villanelle doesn’t.

“So you cannot fly,” Villanelle says, “like they do in stories?”

“No.”

She takes another bite of her pear. “Mm. Rotten luck. You know,” she says, as if they are having a conversation, “I found a bird, once, when I was young? I don’t know what kind of bird. It was small and brown. It broke its wing, just hopping around the vegetable garden. My father told me that it would probably die. Get eaten by a snake or something. Or a bigger bird.”

Villanelle shrugs, eyes still trained on Eve. She barely blinks. Eve tries to imitate it but her eyes just start to burn and she has to squeeze them shut to stop tears from falling.

“So I took it inside,” continues Villanelle. “I put it in a box and gave it bits of grain and things, sometimes fruit. I would hold it and stroke its wings, very soft feathers. It got better. It started to fly around my bedroom and hit itself against the window. It wanted to be free. Do you know what I did then?”

“What did you do?”

She starts to smile, then pulls it back, schools it. “I took it in my hands, felt its little heartbeat. So soft and fast, you know. Tiny. And then I snapped its neck.” Villanelle tosses the pear core behind her, it splats on the floor, and says, “So I think maybe it is good. That you don’t have the wings.” And she raises her gun. “Okay. Explain.”

Eve looks from Villanelle’s eyes to the dark barrel of the handgun. There is little difference to be found there. She licks her lips, starts, “So.” Licks her lips again, why are they so dry? When did she last drink water? It’s exhausting, trying to recall the needs of a human body.

Come to think of it, she is very weary. Almost unreasonably so, even after a fall from Heaven, a night in a forest and a circuitous trip across Europe. Nauseous, too, dizzy, aching head…she catalogues the symptoms. Perhaps she’s sick. Perhaps, after couple of millennia in Heaven, you have to build up a new immunity. 

Eve tries again, “So, I know you’re not religious. But you know the basics, I think? And I’m an angel. Like, from Heaven, and yes, God is real and – “

“I don’t mean _that_ ,” Villanelle scoffs. “I don’t care about that. Explain why I met you in London. Explain why you are here.”

“Oh. I…don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

Eve nods. Sums it up, just about.

“Hm.” Villanelle tilts her head from side to side, and it rocks Eve’s world. In the literal way, like she’s tottering on a sinking boat. “If you’re my guardian angel, then you must know what I am doing all the time. Is that how it works?”

“Yeah. Well, for the past year or more, anyway, I only started…” she trails off to hold in another ramble. Focus. It’s getting harder to put words together. Maybe she’s just hungry? Is this what humans are like when they’re hungry? “Yes. Essentially.”

Villanelle breaks into a smile, animal-like. “Okay. You can prove this? So you know what I was doing on Saturday night?”

“Of course.”

“Well, what was it? Six o’clock.”

Eve thinks back. “You were eating dinner. On your bed. It was takeout, Japanese.”

“Okay. Same night, nine o’clock.”

“You were…” She hesitates; this is starting to feel like a game. And she refuses to be deceived: she is not a true player. “You had some women over?”

“And?”

Eve breathes out through her nose. And how is she supposed to answer questions of this nature while her head feels like it’s about to split in two? “Don’t you believe me?”

“Not yet. Did you watch?”

Eve shuffles on the couch, hopes her shiftiness isn’t taken the wrong way…look, she’s basically swallowing down bile. She might faint. Opening her mouth could be very dangerous.

“Oh, you totally watched. I’m flattered.”

“It’s my _job_.”

Villanelle stretches her neck, preening, then she sets down the gun. The clink of heavy metal hitting glass is stark, as is the change that ripples through Villanelle as she rearranges herself so her feet spread out either side of Eve’s knees. Like she’s putting on a new face, switching track, shaking up the tone.

“Last week,” Villanelle says, mouth pulled tight. “Friday, at noon. What was I doing?”

Oh. “You were in Hamburg,” Eve recites. “In a penthouse suite owned by a wealthy businessman.”

“And what did I do in this suite?”

Eve finds that she remembers everything Villanelle did there, every move, every word, every twitch. Every brushstroke. But the way her head pounds, she says simply, “You killed him.”

“And did I say anything to him?”

“He cried,” Eve says, pressing forward. The sooner this interrogation is over with, the sooner she can address whichever of her bodily needs is making her head swim so. “You said, ‘Stop crying, it won’t help.’ That was it. And then you shot him in the head.”

Villanelle nods and folds her arms, leaning back. It’s like a weight is lifted.

“So you believe me? You won’t kill me?”

“I believe you,” Villanelle answers, addressing the first question and not the second. “That’s why you have this...thing. Like a light on your face. It makes it hard to look at you.”

A crude description. “A halo. I suppose.”

“But you don’t have any wings. Do all the angels have wings? Maybe you don't need them anymore, because you are better than them. And I have you. I must be very special.”

“Actually – “

“Sh-sh-shh. I know the truth. I am very bad, very evil, and they have sent you to find the little spark of good deep, deep, deep down.”

The light of the setting sun is tracking slowly across the room, so Villanelle’s skin glows and her hair glints gold. She seems to bask in it. Eve thinks about lying to her – but she’s not really had much practice at that. She tried to lie to God, and look what happened. And maybe the truth is safer when one party has a loaded gun and a lot of practice using it.

“It’s not because I like you or anything,” Eve insists. “It’s because it’s my job.”

Villanelle purses her mouth into a perfect O. “So, it _is_ true? Now you are here to…save my soul?” The O splits into a grin, sharp-edged, glinting in the sun. “Good luck with that.”

Eve hesitates. “Well, I would’ve picked someone else if I had any choice in the matter. But I didn’t. I – fell.”

“You fell?”

“From Heaven.”

“Like Satan?”

Eve winces, as much from the comparison as from her building headache.

“Ah.” Villanelle nods sagely. As if the unfathomable workings of the heavenly plane could make any sliver of sense to her. “I see. So what do you get out of this?”

“I – “

“Don’t lie to me, please. We know each other better than that.”

Villanelle doesn’t _know_ Eve, this is a one-sided relationship. But, fine. _Fine_. “I think…if I do this, I might get my wings back. I might get back into Heaven. Maybe.” And Eve believes it. There must be some Plan, some reason for all of this – and Eve will figure it out. If she survives.

“Hm,” Villanelle muses. “So you are stuck with me.”

“Don’t you want me gone?”

“Not at all,” she says, shrugging. She leans forward suddenly, Eve jolts, thrills – like a snake strike. Villanelle’s hand hovers above Eve’s shoulders, ghosts behind her back. At some point Villanelle must have picked up the gun again without Eve’s notice because as Villanelle slips astride her lap the butt of the gun thunks against Eve’s collarbone.

If she was feeling sick before, well, now she’s – God, she might be losing her grip on reality. She can’t move. She can’t think – she – her mind is swimming, drowning in something. If this is really what it’s like to have a human brain she thinks she’d like to give it back, thanks, because she might actually faint. The shades of forgotten memories push themselves to the top of the mess – watching, watching, watching for two thousand years; falling for what felt like just as long; a dragon, an alleyway and the _Daily Mail_ ; forehead-crack against a train window, waking in the forest, a small Belgian town. Digging themselves back in, it feels like, and _Villanelle_ is the catalyst. Yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and and and – and all the days before it…

All she can do is curl her fists into the fabric of the couch, dig her heels into the floor, and remember where she is right now. “What are – “

Villanelle’s smile is all it takes to rob the words from Eve’s lips. That smile hooks a thousand other smiles that circle in the back of her pounding head like the fragments of a kaleidoscope, a hundred thousand other smiles, smiles that aren’t even Villanelle’s – and it’s now that she realises just how much she made herself forget. How much she now remembers.

 _Millennia_. Panic spikes behind her ribs – it’s too much, she can’t even think, can barely see anything beyond that smile – how can a human mind handle _millennia_? And do the memories seem to grow stronger the closer she is to Villanelle? An ache starts to tickle in her shoulder blades, beneath Villanelle’s hovering fingers.

Is Eve imagining it or is Villanelle squinting, averting her eyes as if from some great light? But she deflects it with that smile. She leans closer and yes, Eve is definitely going to faint. Or possibly die.

“Not at all, Eve,” Villanelle says again, eyes flickering as they strain to fix on her. And Eve cannot even remember what they were talking about. Villanelle leans even _closer_ if that were at all possible, like she’s trying not just to intimidate Eve but to burrow right beneath her skin. Eve’s head splits. Fingers prodding at the cracks in her mind, perhaps intangible but painful all the same, perhaps mere angelflesh, perhaps tangled in hair, perhaps holding knives.

Brainwaves breaking at the rock of her skull – but between it all, Villanelle is smiling and saying, “I think you could be so much fun.”

The dam breaks.

Eve faints. Or, possibly, dies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> maybe this was a filler chapter but isn't fanfiction just filler everything?


	4. 2 Corinthians 5:7

_(For we walk by faith, not by sight.)_

Eve blinks awake into a cloud of dizziness, a lingering pain-fog. Her head feels like a world in itself. It was never meant to fit, was it? Centuries of memory, divine knowledge stuffed into a tiny human skull, all bound by such flimsy things as cells, atoms. It was never meant to fit.

How she aches to piece together this mystery, along with all the others – they’re piling up like flies on a windowsill. But questions hurt, too, so she terminates that exercise early. Once again, being an angel was a hell of a lot easier than this – whatever _this_ is. Like her head is on fire. No thanks, she’d like to go back. Beam her up already.

A groan tears from her stomach as she tries to sit up. Everything is floating, still, milennia swimming at the edge of her senses. But at least she’s conscious. She wonders how long it will take this human brain to adjust. If it will ever adjust.

She begins to notice a tingling warmth spreading across her skin, and it takes her a moment longer to realise it’s the afternoon sun. She’s watched Villanelle bask in these Parisian sunsets on more than one occasion, in this very bed.

Villanelle. This is Villanelle’s bed, and Eve isn’t dead. Yet.

But – there’s a sharp tug at her wrist as she stretches. Not dead; but handcuffed. She’s handcuffed to the bedframe.

She might _kill_ Villanelle.

Despite it all, Villanelle cannot be the devil because although Eve spends the next half hour staring at the chipped plaster in the ceiling and thinking very inappropriate thoughts about her, she doesn’t appear.

And this time is valuable, Eve spends it well – contemplating her body and realising, hm. She _could_ do it.

She could kill Villanelle, she means. There is potential, at least, if not desire. This is a truth she now knows, all those memories stuffed back into her skull – she could do it. She may have lost her wings but the essence of her remains, the light on her brow and, perhaps, the gateway into humans’ dreams. Perhaps, perhaps, the ability to slip between those dream-waves and clutch at the heart within, tug it or twist it or crush it, as is her whim.

This is exactly what she should not be thinking. If she’s to find her way back into Heaven, get back her wings, then contemplating the murder of her charge is not quite the way to do it. Even if it would reduce the net amount of evil in the world. No, manipulate, _change_ , instead. To tug and twist is the way. Eve can do that, too. She will. Or else she's worried she might do…the other thing.

Of course it’s when Eve is drifting back off to sleep that Villanelle chooses to crash in through the front door, causing Eve to jolt and jar her wrist against the handcuff.

Villanelle appears, then, in the doorway, raising her eyebrows in surprise. “You’re awake.”

“Why am I – “ Eve pulls at the handcuff. “Get me out of this.”

Villanelle shrugs innocently on her way to the wardrobe. “I can’t watch you all day, can I?” she says, hanging up her jacket. “I had things to do.”

“And why chain me up? Why would you have to watch me?”

“Eve. We are a bit unbalanced in that area, don’t you think? Mighty unfair of you. Why did you faint?”

Eve sighs. She suspects she might be doing that a lot from now on. “I don’t know. Uh. I suspect it’s a side-effect of two thousand odd years of memories re-inserting themselves into my brain.”

“Oh. So it wasn’t my feminine charm?”

“It – Can you let me out already?”

“Hm,” says Villanelle, but she fishes a key out from her sock. “You know a lot. You know what I do for a living. I must protect myself, you know? Surely, you cannot blame me.”

“I can blame you for whatever I want,” Eve says, irritation brewing.

“Can you?” Villanelle crouches beside the bed to inspect the handcuffs, and gives her a look of what might be genuine curiosity. “I thought I had the devil in me. Hardly my fault, is it? Or,” she says lowly, “maybe you subscribe to the other view. That evil comes from within. And what would you do then?”

It’s way too early for this conversation, which may be an excuse for Eve never wanting to have this conversation. She snatches her hand back as soon as the cuffs release. She might be willing to bend and scrape before Villanelle just to survive on this hell of an earth, but _philosophy_? She can count on one hand the number of philosophers she’s seen in Heaven; it’s hardly going to be Villanelle’s path to redemption.

But if there is a path – Eve will find it. She has to, she must. What else is she for? The past day has proved that without Heaven, Eve is nothing. And without Villanelle, Eve is even less than that.

Or, at least, somebody up there seems to think so.

Because everything has to mean something, doesn’t it? That’s the whole point of her job. There is a reason she met Villanelle in London, there is a reason she came back to her. It’s nothing more than a puzzle. Eve’s task is to piece it together.

“So, Eve,” Villanelle says above the sizzle of the stove-top. Sausages. Eve finds her mouth watering, her stomach rumbling. She’s growing to realise that food is one of the primary perks of being human. “What _do_ you want? You want to save my soul, truly? You think then God will take you back?”

“No,” Eve replies. She’s just glad she’s no longer chained to a bedpost, she’s just glad Villanelle is no longer sticking her with a knife or holding a loaded gun. Most of all, she’s just glad she’s getting to eat. “I don’t know.”

“Hmm. Maybe I could kill him for you. That would solve all your problems.”

Eve’s first thought is along the lines of, oh _. For_ me _?_ Her second thought is a correction: choked-up horror. “Are you joking?”

Villanelle shrugs, twirling the spatula. How innocent she can make herself seem. “This God man sounds like an asshole. He has people spying on me, all the time? Stupid, too. He kicks beautiful women out of Heaven?”

“I, um. I feel obliged to correct your blasphemy.”

“Okay. Are you going to?”

“No,” Eve says.

“Good. So is it possible?”

“What?”

“Killing God.”

“Oh, God,” mutters Eve, hoping to hell he’s not listening. “You’re not joking.”

Villanelle hums lightly. “I think I could do it.”

If anyone could do it, maybe she could. But Eve doesn’t voice her thoughts, because in more important news: dinner is served. Villanelle eats messily, but Eve digs in with even less dignity – her first proper meal in eons, and she thinks maybe Earth isn’t so bad. At least when she isn’t at the business end of Villanelle’s knife.

Okay, maybe even then.

“So,” Villanelle says squarely through a bite, “you don’t want to send me to hell. That is very un-angel of you.”

“How would you know what an angel does and doesn’t do?”

“Hey, I was a good child, I went to church,” insists Villanelle, so seriously that Eve fights to urge to burst into laughter. The day Villanelle is a good _anything_ is the day hell freezes over – or perhaps the day Eve gets back into Heaven. Either scenario is looking equally unlikely.

“The point is,” Eve says, “I’m not sure there is a hell.”

“No, really? No devil, either?”

“Not in my experience.”

Villanelle sucks her fork between her teeth. “Huh.”

The conversation dies from there, and Eve is onto her third sausage – consumed in quiet but for the clinking of cutlery – before she can no longer stand the way the silence grates.

“Aren’t you going to ask me?” she says quickly.

“What?”

“You know, the question.” At Villanelle’s pointedly confused look, Eve adds, “Where do people go if they don’t go to Heaven.”

“Why would I ask that?”

“You do kill a lot of people,” she points out. “A lot of bad people. Don’t you want to know what happens to them?”

Villanelle sets down her fork and lounges back in her chair. The air immediately shifts and Eve struggles not to sigh. They are just _eating_ _dinner_ , could they do anything more innocuous? Why does everything have to be so hard, why does Villanelle have to make it so?

Eve forces herself to meet Villanelle’s gaze head-on.

Very slowly, Villanelle says, “I don’t really care.”

Eve believes her.

Their plates are clean, the light is fading, and the night looms in that threatening way the night seems to loom when you live inside it, instead of watching it descend from above. Eve is starting to wonder what on earth the night will be, when it comes – will she spend it on the street, on the floor, handcuffed again to Villanelle’s bed? Not like that.

Villanelle appears to be thinking along similar lines, because she observes, “You need me. To look after you.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do,” insists Villanelle. “You just fell from the sky, you have no one and nothing.”

Eve ponders this. It’s completely true, but no one strictly needs to know the extent of Eve’s reliance. The degree to which her world centres around Villanelle is frankly pretty embarrassing, and that ego needs no feeding. “I have…a friend.”

“Oh yeah? Who?”

“Bert.”

“Who is Bert?” When Eve doesn’t answer, Villanelle drums her fingers against the table. “You can stay here. I don’t mind. You are –“ She squints, closes one eye and fixes Eve with the open one – “you are interesting.”

Interesting. She is a whole angel (well, as whole as is possible in this physical form) and the best she can be is _interesting_.

Well. To be interesting is better than whatever fugue state she spiraled down into during her jaunt to Belgium. To be around Villanelle, and to be interesting, is better than to be human. Or to be dead.

“You just like that I’m only here because of you,” Eve points out. “You know that I know everything about you. I know what you get off on. See, I just did it.”

Villanelle scrunches her nose. “No…yes. But I also think angels are very cool. Promise.”

“Well, that helps. Thanks.”

It is difficult to turn off this flippant, casual meanness. It creeps into her like it’s natural, and maybe it is. She has never been skilled at putting on seriousness when it comes to serious things, and this thing – this _whatever_ after all the life-threatening and the angel-revealing – is certainly serious.

This is Villanelle, her charge Villanelle, the assassin Villanelle who has shown she is eminently capable of killing Eve as much as she can be killed in her current form. This is serious.

She tells herself this, but against her will she stretches, squeezes her eyes shut, yawns. What is wrong with her?

“Oh.” Villanelle laughs. “You are sleepy! Do angels sleep?”

Oh. _Sleepy_. It’s different to exhaustion – she was exhausted from the time she woke up on that London street, and hasn’t stopped being exhausted since. This is different, heavy in her bones rather than her soul. She feels more like curling up than zonking out.

“I do now, I guess,” Eve says, eyeing her across the table. “Do you mind if I…”

“Not at all.” There’s none of that sharp smile, but Villanelle’s eyes narrow and cut in a damn good show of it. “I did say. You are welcome.”

After all that, sleep won’t come.

It’s not fair. She’s only just discovered she _can_ sleep, and got a single restful night of it but that was in a forest and she woke up with bugs in her hair, and maybe she got an hour or so this afternoon but that was in the aftermath of her brain rearranging itself so really, Eve thinks she deserves another go at it. A full eight hours in a soft bed – or in this case, Villanelle’s couch, one arm shackled to the coffee table – with pillows and a blanket and the soft ticking of an antique clock.

And she is exhausted – and sleepy, too, apparently – but she cannot. Sleep.

The problem here is Villanelle, as has been every other problem she’s encountered since that spontaneous reassignment. The way Eve sees it, she has two options.

The first is to stay with Villanelle. Try to do her job. Clearly, they want this one _badly_ up in Heaven, badly enough that they would enlist a fallen angel into turning her. Or maybe there’s just no one else up for the task. She’s pretty sure Villanelle’s previous guardian angel never returned from stress leave.

But her chances of succeeding are…nil to none. Not that she’s really exerted all her efforts so far, she spent most of her time watching rather than doing much of anything. This is option one: start trying. Eve is not a big fan of option one.

The second option is even more unthinkable: leaving. Forgetting. Losing her wings and her life and everything she is – falling into the mould of regular human life. Settling down. Getting a job, a place, a husband, maybe. Two thousand odd years down the drain.

Choosing option one means relaxing into this absurdly comfortable couch and letting herself sleep. Choosing option two means finding some way to get herself out of these handcuffs and disappearing into the night. So, naturally, she’s doing neither.

It doesn’t help that she feels the phantom of her wings stretching around her, twitches and folds them on instinct but of course there are no feathers to twitch, no joints to fold.

It doesn’t help that she’s worried about dreaming.

Fear isn’t _rational_ , she knows this. She’s dreamed before. Long, long ago, in her first life – just because she can’t recall the experience doesn’t mean it never happened. And she’s visited the dreams of dozens of others in the time since. So many dreams. And dreams can’t hurt her.

But still. She’s worried she might dream tonight. She’s one step from terrified and she can’t even tease out why.

A sigh slips from her in a wave as she turns onto her back, squeezing her eyes more tightly shut. Her arm flops out in the open air, hanging limply from the handcuff. A low creak shudders through the apartment, probably the old walls settling.

And Eve starts to pray.

It’s uncomfortable, at first. It doesn’t stop being uncomfortable – asking for things, for anything? She’d rather die, except she wouldn’t, not really. Except she’s desperate. She clasps her hands and tips up her chin and focuses on the mirages on the backs of her eyelids.

 _Dear God_ , she thinks.

Too formal? _Hey, God_. _What’s up?_

No, no. Back to _dear_ – dearest of all, of course.

And then – _help_.

What is help? Help _yourself_ , instead, the Protestant ethic. Maybe they were right about some things.

Well, Eve could help herself. She just needs a little leg up. Maybe, maybe, if she had her _wings_ …

 _Is that selfish?_ She thinks the question vaguely into the darkness. To ask for something so material? To desire the power, the respect that would come with it? Yeah, probably. Definitely.

She prays for it anyway.

But praying gets boring, after a while. As does lying still and trying to catch sleep – she’s had this body for, what, two days? And she’s already tired of it. _God is good_ , she thinks pointedly. _Amen_.

That done, she opens her eyes to commence staring at the darkness and –

A monster stares back.

Eve might have hit the ceiling if not for the cuff keeping her grounded to the coffee table; instead, she sprains her arm and swears her heart stops for a good long second. And she hears – cackling.

Villanelle is _laughing_ as she straightens up, wiping fake tears from her eyes.

“What is wrong with you?” Eve doesn’t even bother to pull in the anger that makes her voice shake. She can feel her heartbeat in her limbs, in her head. _Jesus,_ she thinks, trying to take deep breaths – though of course he’s not helping, either.

Villanelle’s smile is razor-sharp in the moonlight. “I thought you would know that better than anyone. You like my joke?”

“No! What was that for? Are you – “ Eve swallows, “Are you… going to kill me?”

“Ah. No, I forgot that you might need to use the bathroom. And I have decided you aren’t a threat.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“Mm. Yes. It is what I do for a living, so I tend to know, you know? When people can and when they cannot. And you, Eve, my angel…I think you cannot,” Villanelle says profoundly, unhooking the handcuffs. “Also, you have spindly little arms.”

And Villanelle leaves her with one last smile – seriously, how does she know exactly where to stand so that the moon will glint off of her teeth? It’s eerie. It takes a long while for Eve to settle back onto the couch, rubbing her sore wrist and now a little frightened to close her eyes again.

So, shoving the heart in her throat to one side, at least she’s halfway through option two. Handcuffs no longer a barrier to slipping out the door and into the city, throwing herself from this rickety boat onto solid land. She could leave right now.

She tells herself this – again, again. Just do it. Next second she’ll drag herself up and creep from the apartment and be gone. Shed herself, discard her memories, and leave Villanelle behind. It would be that easy.

She falls asleep, eventually.

Eve wakes before Villanelle, because Villanelle sleeps like the dead. Eve knows this. She’s spent countless hours watching her from above, dozing past the midday. She’s fine with it.

But…what is she to do?

Breakfast, she thinks. That’s what people do. She rummages in the kitchen cupboards but comes up with very little – some eggs, caviar, hot sauce. She’s watched her charges fry up eggs countless times. She should be well equipped to try it herself.

Villanelle finds her half an hour later, two frypans and a carton of eggs down, with nothing sunny-side-up to show for it. A raised eyebrow is all Eve gets for her troubles.

“I have a job tomorrow,” Villanelle is saying as Eve dumps the debris in the sink. “In Poland. You will be wanting to come?”

“Yes. No.” Eve considers. “Well, I have to, don’t I?” Or else be doomed to a life of pure humanity – banish the thought.

Villanelle has other ideas. “Or you’ll turn to dust?” she suggests cheekily. “Sparkle in the sunlight?”

“Wrong supernatural entity.”

“Fine. I have decided to let you come. But you don’t get in the way or I will kill you.”

“I think I’m still technically immortal,” Eve says, hoping it’s not a lie.

“You underestimate my skills, Eve. And my determination. By the way…you have money?”

Eve pauses with her spoon in the jar of caviar – the egg operation abandoned, Villanelle has little else in her cupboards sufficient to comprise a meal. “Uh. No.”

“You have a passport?”

“No.” _Shit_. “I just fell from Heaven, why would I – “

But Villanelle is laughing. “Your God is useless.”

Villanelle leaves to wherever it is she goes, her chuckle still ringing up the staircase, and Eve is left to huff and stare at the dishes she refuses now to clean and to think, as stiffly as she can think it, that she cannot even disagree.

It takes Eve the rest of the day, really, to work it out. A lazy, restless day – Eve has been forbidden to leave the apartment, and perhaps she doesn’t want to. Is it worth the cost, navigating what’s out there? Villanelle is one thing to deal with. Humans in general would be quite another.

So Eve spends most of the day lying on the couch and trying to sort into some neater piles the millennia of memory violently re-inserted into her brain. She naps intermittently, because when she thinks too hard about how it all fits in there a cold ache starts to grow behind her eyes, threatening to overwhelm.

Villanelle flits in and out, returning each time with clothes or expensive groceries. “How are you doing?” she asks once, casual words with an insincere plaque.

Eve’s answer is more of the same: pretending to sleep, then falling into it for real, which is the best part of all of this. The sleeping is really rather nice. How did she survive two thousand years up there without the pleasure of periodic unconsciousness?

And when she is awake, Eve wonders why she is still around. She wonders why she hasn’t been strung up or chained to the bed and interrogated at the point of a knife and a gun and Villanelle's piercing stare. She wonders why she didn’t just die in the fall, wouldn’t that have made things easier? Wouldn’t she have been more in death than this: dozing on the couch of her own charge, the very one she failed to change? As if she could succeed in that task, now. As if she could even try. An embarrassment.

Or perhaps not. She has made a decision, and now she will sit in the muck of it. She will be the angel who fell to Earth, she _will_ try, at the least she will stay and she will watch Villanelle and maybe, maybe, Eve will be able to change her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay, the world has exploded but i wanted to squeeze out a chapter before christmas. 
> 
> and happy holidays! or, to be more realistic, i wish you a safe and healthy holiday. especially if you're spending it alone, as so many of us are. i hope you can find a spot of joy/community somewhere. you're very welcome to hit me up @ lliraels on twitter or tumblr for a chat


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